ST. PETERSBURG, FL. A state inspector walked into Casita Taqueria #3 on 66th Street North on September 2 and found food not cooked to the minimum required temperature, employees not reporting illness symptoms, and no person in charge present or performing duties. The restaurant collected seven high-severity violations that day. It was not closed.
What Inspectors Found
Every one of the seven violations documented that day was classified at the highest severity level. Not one was flagged as intermediate or basic.
The undercooked food violation sits at the top of that list for a reason. Salmonella in poultry survives below 165 degrees Fahrenheit, and a kitchen without an active manager on duty is a kitchen without the single layer of oversight most likely to catch that failure before food reaches a plate.
Two separate handwashing violations were cited on the same visit: employees not washing hands adequately, and employees using improper technique when they did wash. Those are not the same problem. The first means handwashing was skipped or insufficient. The second means that even when the sink was used, pathogens were likely left behind.
Improperly cleaned food contact surfaces completed a picture of a kitchen operating without basic controls in place that day.
What These Violations Mean
The combination of violations documented on September 2 is not a collection of paperwork failures. It is a sequence of conditions that, together, create a direct path from contaminated food to a sick customer.
Undercooked food is where that path starts. Poultry cooked below the required temperature can carry live Salmonella onto a plate. Without a consumer advisory posted, customers with compromised immune systems, pregnant women, and the elderly had no notice that undercooked items might be on their food.
The illness-reporting failure compounds that risk sharply. Food workers who do not report symptoms of illness are the leading cause of multi-victim outbreaks, according to CDC data. If an employee working that shift was sick with norovirus, the two handwashing violations documented the same day ensured there was no secondary barrier to transmission. Contaminated hands touching improperly sanitized cutting boards or prep surfaces can spread pathogens across an entire line of food in a single shift.
The absence of a person in charge is not a scheduling inconvenience. CDC data links establishments without active managerial control to three times the rate of critical violations. The manager is the person who checks temperatures, enforces handwashing, and pulls a sick employee off the line. On September 2, that person was not there, or was not doing the job.
The Longer Record
September 2 was not an anomaly for Casita Taqueria #3. It was the continuation of a pattern running back years.
The restaurant has 20 inspections on record and 145 total violations. Of the eight most recent inspections before September 2, only one, in June 2024, produced zero violations. Every other visit found high-severity citations.
The April 2024 inspection produced six high-severity and four intermediate violations. The inspection before that, in October 2023, produced six high-severity violations. The April 2026 inspection, five months before the September visit, produced seven high-severity and three intermediate violations, matching the September count at the high-severity level.
Two days after the September 2 inspection, a follow-up visit on September 4 found three additional high-severity violations still present. The kitchen had not been corrected fully even after inspectors had already documented the full list.
The restaurant has never been emergency-closed in its inspection history. That fact sits alongside 145 total violations across 20 inspections.
The Pattern
The January 2025 inspection found five high-severity violations. The September 2024 inspection found five. The April 2024 inspection found six. The October 2023 inspection found six. No inspection in that two-year stretch, except for one visit in June 2024, came back clean.
The categories repeat. Management failures, handwashing deficiencies, and food handling violations appear across multiple inspection cycles at this address. These are not isolated incidents caught on a bad day. They are the same problems documented repeatedly by different inspectors across different seasons.
State records show Casita Taqueria #3 at 2991 66th Street North has accumulated more violations per inspection, on average, than most facilities accumulate in their entire operating history.
After seven high-severity violations on September 2, and three more still outstanding two days later, the restaurant remained open for business.
